After the amazing Diet Coke-Mentos video from the guys at Eepybird.com exploded onto the scene thanks to YouTube (and later Revver), there was a sharp divide between the reaction from Mentos and Coca-Cola. The Italian company that makes Mentos saw it as free advertising and immediately wanted to do something with the Eepybird team — saying they probably got $10-million worth of free viral advertising from the clip. Coke effectively looked down its nose and sniffed.

A little while ago I wrote that Coke appeared to have finally grabbed a clue, because they were involved in an online contest with the Eepybird guys (also on Revver, as someone from the video site points out in my comments). As it turns out, though, it sounds more like they were dragged kicking and screaming (or whining) into clue-land, according to this story at MediaPost.

John Stichweh, director of global interactive marketing, cast doubt on whether the company thinks engagement is a goal worth pursuing. The measurement that really matters, he said, is sales. “How many more cases of Coke am I selling? I don’t know,” he said at the Ad:Tech conference in New York.

According to the story, the Coke exec also questioned whether doing interactive or “user-generated” advertising was any cheaper than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in traditional media, saying that online campaigns are cheaper up front but “there is a cost element in terms of internal labor.”

I guess he’s got a point — if by “internal labor” you mean paying someone to run around at headquarters pulling people’s heads out of the sand and showing them how to click on the “most popular” link at YouTube.

Coca-Cola, the giant sugar-water purveyor, has finally seen the light when it comes to the famous Diet Coke-and-Mentos video that became a viral hit on YouTube and Revver earlier this year. If you haven’t seen it, the video shows the Eeepybird team — two guys in white lab coats and goggles, who are really a professional juggler named Fritz Grobe and a lawyer named Stephen Voltz — conducting a sort of choreographed dance involving bottles of Diet Coke (some of them hanging from strings) and packages of Mentos mints, which together produce giant geysers of pop and create a kind of moving fountain.

The company that makes Mentos (a subsidiary of an Italian concern called Perfetti van Melle) quickly saw the benefit of this video, which they said was equivalent to about $10-million dollars worth of advertising, and arranged to have the Eepybird team create some other videos just for them. Coca-Cola, however, took the “Hey, quit fooling around with our product” tack, and said it had no intention of doing anything with the Eepybird guys, because — as Coke told the Wall Street Journal — that type of craziness “doesn’t fit with the Coke brand.”

Obviously, someone at Coke gave their head a shake and decided that getting millions of dollars in free advertising was probably a good thing (Gee — ya think?) and the company recently announced a new Poetry in Motion contest, as Kevin Nalty describes on his video blog here. Congratulations to Coke for finally grabbing a clue. Too bad it took so long.